The Great Unknown

by Peg Kingman

  “Who is that Mr Anstruther?” asked Mrs Chambers, already abed, as her husband undressed.

  “He is a paper-manufacturer, who is perfecting—he claims—a new process for making paper inexpensively, of wood fibre. My brother considers the manufacture feasible, but wants my opinion of the man.”

  “Ah,” she said. They heard, briefly, one of the babies crying, above. It might be their own Charlie. Light quick footsteps passed to and fro overhead, and the baby hushed almost immediately. “Do you know,” Mrs Chambers added thoughtfully, “I should like to convince Mrs MacAdam to sing, one of these evenings.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I should like to have a glimpse into her soul.”

  “How alarming! I daresay she will be prudent enough to keep silent,” said he. “What do you make of the souls of those of us who decline to sing?”

  “Not everyone is a singer. There are plenty whose music is of another sort—whose genius is of another sort. I mean only that . . . I still marvel, always, upon first hearing some new acquaintance sing, especially if it is someone whose measure I thought I had taken. How often have I been astonished at the voice which comes from a person I had dismissed as—uninteresting, or dull-witted, or mean-spirited, or simply unhandsome: sallow, or plain, or sadly chinless! How often I have found that I had judged wrong! And how marvelously, how instantly does the singer gain in beauty, in my eyes, upon giving utterance, upon revealing this hitherto hidden splendour! At once the veil falls from my eyes, and I am dazzled by the shining spirit which, until then, I had been too stupid to perceive, or even suspect.”

  “Never stupid, my dear.”

  “Oh, but I must be—for this has happened often enough that it ought not to catch me by surprise, still—but it often does. Often enough that I ought not to place much faith in my judgment of anyone, until I have heard her, or him, sing, or play. Now, I did not much like your bewhiskered Mr Anstruther, my dear—so ill-bred of him, at dinner—”

  “Aye, rather.”

  “But I have not heard him sing. Occasionally it is borne in upon me that I must almost always go about my business blind to the inner beauties of nearly all those around me. For I have never heard the laundress sing, nor the conductor on the railway, nor the man at the tollbooth. I heard the gardener today, however, when he thought no one was about; and although I had hitherto mistaken him for a meager little bent body, I came at once to see him truly: a braw figure of a man!—just so soon as I heard the fine tenor voice of him.”

  2

  THE GARDENER CAME with the house, and he did not much approve of children in his grounds. They were particularly hard on hedges. He was attached to his garden as a ewe to her hill; as a salmon to its stream; as a pigeon to its doocot. Owners and tenants will come, and will go; but Mr Gunn had tended Spring Gardens since boyhood, succeeding his father there. He drank rather too much, because his work left his mind (quite an active one) free to ponder the ways of Providence; and furnished a great deal of matter to ponder.

  As he saw it, the fundamental problem was this: How could there be so much scope for improvement in the Almighty’s creation? How was it that he himself, a mere gardener, had, in the course of a lifetime’s sweaty and dirty labour, so improved upon the wasteland that had been here until his own father had commenced to cultivate it? In short, why hadn’t God made a garden here in the first place? While Mr Gunn despised the horticultural ignorance of almost all mortal beings, he was obliged to grant that God was probably not ignorant; was probably capable of making quite a good garden, if only He chose (had indeed once done so; it was written). Why did He not so choose? And why—while he was at the business of lodging complaints—why did God so evidently grudge Mr Gunn’s own poor efforts to remedy His omission in this respect? Why the late frosts which blackened the tender young seedlings? Why the gale winds which disfigured the noble old trees, amputating their limbs, even ripping them out by the roots? Why the rabbits? the blights, the careless children, the birds? “Providence” indeed! To Mr Gunn, when in his cups, this seemed a bitter sarcasm; and “Heavenly Father” was still worse. Any earthly father who treated his offspring so cruelly, so carelessly, with such unjust, offhand callousness as did this Heavenly Father, would fall afoul of a Sheriff’s censure at least, if not a prison sentence, or a term in the asylum for the unfit.

  The unfit.

  He had asked himself whether these merciless decimations might not be the divine method of weeding out the unfit; had examined this question strictly, and thoroughly; and continued to re-examine it periodically. He had concluded, however, that they were not. The garden’s most promising sapling might fall victim to random death; might be decapitated in a moment by a falling branch. If the wind had been blowing from the west instead of the east, the branch would have fallen six inches away, thus sparing the best sapling ever bred; sparing it to glorify the world. But no; the best sapling ever bred was destroyed, a victim not of any unfitness in itself, but of gravity and chance; or else of Almighty wantonness.

  Explaining this pervasive wantonness and waywardness in all things—the liability, nay, the irresistable tendency toward death, decay, and destruction—was the business of the clerics, but Mr Gunn did not have much faith in their tortured explanations. The more he thought about it, the more certain it appeared to him that he might as well attribute divine qualities to—oh, to choose at random—gravity. He might as well offer up his morning offices to Gravity; his prayers of petition, of praise, of thanks:

  O Gravity, our heavenly Father, Almighty and everlasting Lord, which hast safely brought us to the beginning of this day, defend us in the same with thy mighty power, and grant that this day we fall into no sinne, nor off of thy planet Earth, neither runne into any kinde of danger: but that all our doings may be ordered by thy governance, to do alwayes that is righteous in thy sight, and to hold down fast upon thy Earth which hast made for us thy children; through Jesus Christ our Lord. Amen.

  Nevertheless, Mr Gunn went out every morning, still reeking of last night’s gin and blasphemy, to resume teaching the Almighty a lesson; to demonstrate to the All-Powerful what He ought to have done with this particular piece of land. Look: a well-grown allée here, symmetrical; and there, beech nodding to oak; now, isn’t that pleasant? Wilt Thou taste the fruit of my orchard, my peach trees which I myself have bred, during my own lifetime, over twenty peach-generations; are these not incomparably sweeter and more fragrant than the bitter wee nubs which Thou hast vouchsafed unto us, Thy children? Regard my roses! (the only true claim of the French to culture—their only true contribution to humanity—is these roses, bred from the promising but undeveloped and undistinguished stock Thou sawest fit to furnish unto us, Thy cherished children, cherished just as the sow cherishes her naked helpless piglets when she rolls over them, when she crushes and smothers them in the filth of her stye; cherished just as the salmon cherishes its spawn which it deposits in the gravel of the streambed, and swims away)—I beseech thee, O Almighty, smell my roses, each offering up its own distinct and ravishing perfume!

  The Almighty continued an inattentive student, however, and the gardener continued to drink gin each night. He would have preferred wholesome whisky, but gin was cheaper. His wife had died a decade earlier, and all that now remained of her was a collection of bird nests lined up on the bookshelf in his cottage. These beloved nests were lined with her hair, for she had always gone out to the garden to comb her long hair. Some of the nests were evidently from the summers of her youth, when her hair was still black; and others were from later years, after it had gone white. (Gone white within the period of a month; the month in which all three of their handsome strong sons had died, of the typhoid that raged through Scotland that year.) There were several nests lined with coarse russet horsehair, too, from the summers when a pair of horses had grazed the field beyond the wall. One of these nests held three small unhatched blue eggs—not because Mr Gunn had stolen the nest before they could hatch; not because some flighty mo
ther had abandoned them—but because a late frost had frozen them under their diligent mother’s breast, so that they never hatched though she continued to sit on them for six weeks afterward. O, Almighty east wind! Mr Gunn had not gathered the nest until the bird, despairing of her lifeless eggs, had abandoned them at last.

  The noble beech tree that had dropped a branch upon—had destroyed—the most promising peach sapling ever germinated had not always been so fine. The beech in its youth had been inconspicuous. In middle age, ungainly; too slender. Only now, in its maturity, had it attained nobility. It seemed to Mr Gunn that trees became handsomer under the beams of human regard. Could this be? Could a tree feel those beams, and form itself according to those wishes? Was the tree truly handsomer now than ever before? Or did it only appear handsome, because it was by now so utterly familiar to him, and therefore pleasant to his sight?

  Every tree inside the garden wall was deeply familiar. They were imbued with personalities, and associations. Mr Gunn adored puns, even Latin puns. For him, the medlar espaliered against the south side of the north wall represented that Lady Janet who lived with the Chambers family; she, the meddler! Whereas the fruitless peach which he kept for the sake of its glorious flowering represented Mrs Chambers: she, the unimpeachable!

  Despite his frequent despairs, Mr Gunn often sang, and he knew a great many old songs well-suited to his various moods. What moved him to sing? Sometimes it was exhilaration, caused by a bird, or a blossom, or a breeze; but at other times he lifted up his voice in sorrow, or in fury. There were songs for anything.

  From where he worked, strawing the rhubarb bed against coming frost, Mr Gunn could see the wet nurse seated on a garden bench under a drooping rhododendron, reading in the fickle September sunshine. Somewhere atop the beech tree a thrush practised its crunluaths. A gospel verse sprang into his mind: “But woe unto them that are with child, and to them that give suck, in those days!” Both babies napped on a blanket spread on the grass at the wet nurse’s feet. He had tried speaking with her once or twice, about pigeons. Mr Gunn doted upon his pigeons. After a lifetime of observing them, he marveled still at their resemblance to humankind. He never tired of watching their courtship: their flirting, their coquetting—and even kissing. They “married,” too, remaining faithful to the same mate as long as they both did live. And although they were birds and not mammifers, they fed their insatiable offspring on “milk” disgorged from their own crops. They were gratifying to breed, for they bred frequently, all the year around; their hatchlings matured to breeding age in a matter of weeks; and they manifested a remarkable disposition to sport. This did not mean that they were particularly frolicsome. “Disposition to sport” was a phrase from a book he knew well, written by Mr Patrick Matthew of Gourdiehill—and it had stuck in his mind. It meant that the offspring were apt to differ from their parents. He had mentioned this to the wet nurse, but evidently she was not much interested in pigeons or their breeding; and evasive when he asked whence she had her bird, and why. Is it a French bird, he had asked her—for the bird had a foreign look about it, and he had been told that she had lived in France. No, she had said, it is English. Oh; where in England? Just English, she said. I had it of my husband.

  Constantia was reading, in fits and starts; hearing birdsong and the older children, playing nearby; and waiting for the babies to awaken and relieve again the increasing pressure in her breasts—nearly as hard now as the lichened breasts of the crumbling marble Demeter upon her plinth in a recess of the yew hedge.

  Lizzy burst through the hedge, in tears. “Oh, Mrs MacAdam! Do bring it back!” she cried, cradling something in her hands. “It was just pecking in the grass near the corner of the house, when that six-toed cat leapt out at it, and it flew up all in a rush to get away, and hurtled against the window and fell down again, and the cat went for it, but I chased the wicked cat away, and picked it up myself. Do bring it back, Mrs MacAdam, do! Surely it cannot be dead, for it was alive, not a minute since, and the cat never touched it. Take it, here; cannot you bring it back?”

  Sometimes birds were only stunned by crashing against windows, but this plump young pigeon was dead. Its head fell sideways as Constantia set down her book and received the still-warm body into her cupped hands. It was a Spring Gardens pigeon, not her own English bird. Its eyes and its beak were open; indeed, she could see its tongue. She turned it, smoothing the pearlescent feathers, and the head lolled back. Its clean fine-scaled feet were like pink coral; like curls of seaweed washed up on sand. The edges of the pinion feathers were both stiff and soft; the small feathers covering the breast yielding like fine chainmail over the exquisitely-made body beneath. Jeanne D’Arc, thought Constantia, and felt surprise at so odd and unbidden an idea.

  “It cannot be dead,” insisted Lizzy.

  “It is, though,” said Constantia. “I am sorry.” And she was; an ocean of sorrow lay in her chest, leaden as the North Sea; lapping cold and salty against her heart.

  “If I keep it warm and quiet, won’t it come right again?”

  “No,” said Constantia, “it cannot come alive again. Dead is dead.”

  “I hate cats!” cried Lizzy hotly. “I wish God never made them!” And, taking back the dead pigeon, she ran off, cradling it.

  Such a wish, Lady Janet would have said, was sinful. Who were you, to criticise His arrangements, for His creation?

  The wind came up, and clouds blew in front of the sun. Constantia gathered up both babies and carried them indoors, leaving the blanket on the grass and the book on the bench.

  Mr Gunn watched these for a while; then, when rain threatened, he went and picked up the blanket and folded it. Taking up the book, he recognized it: Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation. There was a bookmark, an orange thread. The wet nurse was reading the chapter about the Origin of the Animated Tribes.

  Mr Gunn had, six months before, borrowed a copy of Vestiges from the Mechanics Institute library, read it overnight, and sent it back the next morning. Then, several weeks later, he had borrowed and read it again, taking time to copy out certain of the most striking passages. He had by now committed to memory those passages which most interested him, and he often mulled them over as he toiled over his spade or his fork. One such was this sentence from the unknown author’s closing remarks: “It will occur to every one, that the system here unfolded does not imply the most perfect conceivable love or regard on the part of the Deity towards his creatures.”

  Mr Gunn had meditated so long and so closely upon this thought that it had suffused him entirely, as tea suffuses hot water. Indeed, as he labored, forking up the waterlogged soil, he sometimes found himself panting these words as though they were a song, to the tune of “The True Lover’s Farewell”:

  It will occur to every one

  That the system here unfolded

  does not imply a perfect love

  on the part of our Almighty God

  Towards us, His suff’ring creatures.

  There was a second verse, too, also derived from the closing remarks of the unknown author of Vestiges: “It is necessary to suppose that the present system is but a part of a whole, a stage in a Great Progress, and that the Redress is in reserve”—which fell thus into verse:

  To compensate for God’s neglect,

  ’Tis necessary to suppose

  the present system only part of a Whole

  —a stage in a Great Progress—

  with Redress lying in reserve!

  It is necessary to suppose.

  Redress must lie in reserve. Surely?

  Mr Gunn knew the book’s concluding sentence: Let us wait the end with patience, and be of good cheer. Not so different from Luke 21:19: In your patience possess ye your souls.

  Mr Gunn had concluded that time meant nothing to the Deity, just as it meant nothing to animals. During a summer of his boyhood, his father had lent him to a neighboring farmer, to follow the plowhorse from sunup to sundown, every day. The horse had one day conceived a prof
ound aversion to a particular corner of a field and, in spite of any inducement or punishment that Mr Gunn (Johnny Gunn, then; plowboy) could contrive, had refused to set foot beyond a certain invisible line on the ground, only standing trembling wide-eyed staring at nothing, as terrified as Macbeth who look’d but on a stool. No whip, no encouragement, no example could make the horse stir so much as one step further. Yet that corner of the field was prime ground, and could not be left unplowed. What was to be done?

  Johnny Gunn had felt fury rising in his breast. How dared this dumb beast to defy him! To delay him! And then he had calmed himself, reasoning: If you cannot master this horse, you do not deserve to call yourself his master. If you are not cleverer and more patient than a horse, you can claim no right to compel obedience from it. You are bent upon making this horse obey you Now—because you have a notion of time passing. But for this horse, all is Now; all is the present moment; it has no notion of future or past moments, only a continuous stream of present moments. Let us stop and stand here, at the invisible line. You can wait as long as this horse can, and a little longer, too. And you need not pay the slightest regard to how long it may take—for the horse will not consider any delay to be a victory on its own part—having no concept of delay, or the passage of time; precious fleeting commodity, time!

  Johnny Gunn took his book out of his pocket (for he always had a book handy for the beguiling of spare moments, rare though they were) and, the reins looped across his shoulders, sat down upon the unplowed part of the ground before the horse, and read his book.